


restart

by hooliganism



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Kinda, Reincarnation AU, Solavellan, like the good place, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:40:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27599725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hooliganism/pseuds/hooliganism
Summary: remaking the world is an imperfect art
Relationships: Fen'Harel | Solas/Female Lavellan
Kudos: 7





	restart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [natehsewell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/natehsewell/gifts).



> *puts on my clown nose*

Restart

He’s remade the world a few times. Several times, in fact, too many for him to remember each one. The major players are there, in some form-- Cassandra, Iron Bull, Varric, and the rest.

And the Inquisitor.

They don’t always cross paths in these new lives, but when they do it’s… explosive. Occasionally literally, but he and Ellena have always been prone to clashing in the most fantastic of ways, their battle of wills playing out with sparks and flame.

Good times.

In some lives she’s taken him into her bed. Other times it’s men and women who in another world would have been Sera, or Cassandra, or even the Commander. Some lives it’s someone entirely different, and some lives she doesn’t take a lover at all. He is halfway ashamed to admit that he has been keeping careful count of this, through their many lives.

He’s the only one who remembers.

This most recent life rather mimics their time in the Inquisition, where he and the Inquisitor had a solid working relationship, were friends, but nothing more. This time her husband is Cullen Rutherford (who seems to be her companion of choice these past several cycles, and it _galls_ him) and they’ve just had their first child.

A child that, in other lives, belonged to him.

Most of the original inner circle come to visit. Dorian cries when he holds the newborn for the first time, Vivienne is honored to be named the godmother. When the time comes for Solas to hold the infant himself, it’s disconcerting-- to look at a child with El’s eyes and Cullen’s hair.

He can’t help but think that the children he and Ellena had, in other lives, were more comely. But he cannot find it in his heart to dislike anything that has Ellena in it. This child will have his heart as thoroughly as if it were his own, just as its mother does.

He has remade the world many times over, and for the first many hundreds of times it was to bring about his own lost time: the world he destroyed in his arrogance, the world he saved from the other Evanuris. For centuries now lost to the ether, he labored to bring back what was destroyed, fruitlessly, frustratingly, forever out of reach. And it ever slipped away, like water through his cupped palms before he could drink.

The more he reworked the world, trying to mold it into the image of something he couldn’t quite remember, the more El entered his orbit. Or more precisely, he was drawn to hers. Like a moth to a flame, like an asteroid caught in the gravitational pull of a star, he could not help himself from seeking her warmth.

And like the moth, like the asteroid, he constantly found himself being burned by her.

“Sol?” Ellena asks. She’s tired, but radiant in an unspeakable way; bathed in the late afternoon sunlight streaming in through the hospital window, her auburn hair loose around her shoulders and disheveled from the long process of giving life. The sight scorches him as surely as if he had placed his hand on a fire, and ignites something that has burned low in him for a long time.

He comes back to himself sharply, and finds that Ellena’s child is still in his arms. Sleeping peacefully, for now. Solas can relate-- being born is hard work. Especially when you’re remaking the fabric of reality to birth a new world.

 _She has your eyes_ , he thinks but does not say. _Your nose_. What he says instead is “She’s beautiful,” and he half-hopes that Ellena picks up on the words he was too cowardly to speak.

It should not matter to him. He has shaped the world to his will, a thousand thousand times, has made and unmade realities. It should not matter to him who the woman who was once the Inquisitor takes to her bed, whose child she has, who she loves.

She’s chosen him more than once.

It matters so much.

Sometimes he thinks about where they started, and if he was a fool to try and remake a vanished world. A time forgotten by everyone but him, when he had Ellena to himself, but cast her aside. For the good of the elves, he thought at the time. To lift their people high again, see them restored to their ancient glory. For the good of no one, he knows now; especially not himself, eternally bound to watch his former friends and lover live their lives and die their deaths. Endlessly.

And he is the arbiter of that cycle, of the ouroboros he’s found himself trapped in; when the world does not match his design, he simply begins again. Wiped the slate clean, and hoped to see her in the next life. For while Ellena has demonstrated that if he acted too egregiously, she would not hesitate to do what she thought was right, Solas has only demonstrated his weakness. He feels the urge now-- to wipe away this reality and replace it with one more to his liking. Erase and replace with a reality closer to his vision-- with the elves again immortal and rich with magic and knowledge, in their rightful place.

One where Ellena chose him.

He cannot force Ellena to love him, he knows this; he cannot take away her choices and her will. Her heart is not his to take. But, by the foundations of the earth, he wants to so badly.

After all, the restart button is within his reach. All he need do is press it.


End file.
